These kids today with their twits and their tweets, their ninth-place ribbons and their gimme gimme gimme! Lazy! Selfish! Back in my day …

Pinning the “me, me, me” label on Gen Y, millennials, or whatever you want to call them, has become so ubiquitous, Time magazine actually blasted it across their cover a few months ago: “The ME ME ME Generation.”

But guess what? Twentysomethings aren’t apologizing. They say it’s a good thing.

…

Patricia Greenfield, a psychological scientist at the University of California in Los Angeles, used the Google Ngram Viewer to scan more than 1 million books. Her findings, which were published in Psychological Science, showed that there has been a distinct rise in more individualistic words such as “choose,” “get,” “feel,” “unique,” “individual” and “self” and a decrease in community-focused words such as “obliged,” “give,” “act,” “obedience,” “authority,” “pray” and “belong.”